Category Archives: Inspiration

Salon Meeting Coming Up!

The April 4 meeting (6:30 pm) will feature a competition salon, judged by Mike Prokosch. I got to know Mike when I first started representing our club at the Camera Council (TCACCC). He is one of the most self-less people I know, having helped with Spring Break and the Interclub Competition for many years. He has also taught a judging class for the TCACCC, and has helped start-up clubs. He is called upon often to judge and to make photography-related presentations for area clubs, always generous with his time. Being an avid nature photographer, he has traveled the world.

Reminders

April 10 is the deadline for entering the six N4C contests and May 16 is the deadline for entering the club’s June competition salon. The assignment for June is “self-portrait”, something that I am finding to be a challenge! You can download quick guides for our club salons here and for N4C contests here.

Parking: Parking is no longer allowed in front of the building. Download a parking map here.

We will guide ourselves around the capitol building and photograph this amazing piece of architecture. Admission is free and 45-minute tours are given on the hour for a donation of $5.00. Tripods are welcome, but please make sure they have rubber feet as to avoid damage to the floors. Please be aware that they may be busy with tours and other visitors, so be careful to avoid tripping others with tripods, and safeguard your equipment.

Solar Eclipse Information from Bryan Leonard

In case you haven’t heard, a total solar eclipse will occur on Monday, August 21, 2017. The path of total darkness will start on the west coast in Oregon and move across the central Unites States to the east coast in South Carolina. Any spot along the path will be dark for 2-3 minutes. But, the entire continental U.S. may see the eclipse, even though it may be a partial eclipse. Hudson, WI will see an estimated 85% eclipse. Times for Hudson will be: Continue reading »

Considering the cold weather, we had a great turnout (and better parking spots close to the building). After Gene Schwope, representing the PSA, gave Michael Huber his first place award for “Basket Ballin’”, Michael went on to demonstrate how he makes his creative compositions in Photoshop. This included how he started out by filling a layer 50% gray. Then he masked images using the quick select tool and moving them into the composition. It also included replacing the sky using a mask with a gradient, and other uses of layer masks and brushes. I was enthralled by one of the custom brushes that he used to create mood with lighting effects and how he transformed it to suit the composition. One of the tips he provided was reducing the saturation of some of the layers to help them match the rest of the composition. Though this session was not recorded, he made a video a while back on the award-winning image. You can find it on a previous post here. Scroll to the bottom for the video.

More from Michael

Michael has uploaded another fresh video on the club’s YouTube channel. Since he’s been doing all the cast photos for the Phipps Children’s Theater productions for the last couple years, he wanted to share the process with us. Thanks, Michael! This may come in handy for capturing and processing portraits for the “Humanity” assignment we have later this year

Itten’s Theory of Composition – Contrasts in Photography

City Lights 3 Photowalk

St. Paul across the River – Terry Butler

Join Troy Schmidt, Bryan Leanard and me on our third city lights photowalk. Meet at 5:30 PM at the Hudson Park & Ride across from Target. We will travel to St. Paul to capture the city skyline against the Mississippi River. We will start at Mounds Park where we will hopefully have a nice sunset. We may also try the high bridge. We will then venture down to the riverfront of the Mississippi near Harriet Island, and the Robert & Wabasha Street Bridges.

What to Bring: Tripod, remote shutter release, flashlight, and jacket…it’s that time of year!

Phipps Exhibit and Party

Taking on a Challenge

After being asked by the Hudson High School Girls Volleyball Team to create a team poster, Michael Huber relented, partly because he felt bad about their not having one, and partly because of the challenge it would bring. Michael had a vision of how he wanted the end product to be, which helped in capturing and processing all the images he would need. It helped that he already has experience in achieving the Joel Grimes look of grittiness that he wanted. It also helped that he has a working knowledge of lighting and how to work with the girls. So, what do you get when you have the vision to make a composite of all these images and more?

This video on our YouTube Channel shows the challenge from start to finish.

Greg Lundgren Follow Up

Jeff Bucklew

Jeff has been enjoying gallery representation at Seasons on St. Croix Gallery in Hudson for over six years. He appreciates his relationship with the gallery owner, Ruth Misenko, who promotes and sells his work. He does his own printing, as well as all aspects of the framing process, including cutting the mats and making the frames. Scenes of Hudson and elsewhere in the area, as well as photos from Mexico, the North Shore, and wildlife are mainstays. Because of his signature style, Jeff has become the exclusive photographer for the Hudson Chamber of Commerce and his work is used in their publications that are widely distributed. Currently, one of his photos is the cover of “The Wild and Secenic St. Croix Valley” the 2016 Visitor Guide for the St. Croix Valley. The “Welcome to Hudson” sign coming into Hudson from I-94 also sports his work. His web site is here.

Ken Krautbauer

Ken has recently begun a relationship with Kelley Frame & Fine Art Gallery in Hudson. We all know about his unique vision, his style that he imprints on his memorable images and which attracted the owner’s attention. There you can purchase framed prints, matted prints and note cards that are all on display.

Waterfalls

High Falls on the Pigeon River by Rikk Flohr

Rikk Flohr will be the guest speaker at the special meeting on June 15, 6:30 pm. The title of his presentation is “Waterfalls” and it will include capture techniques and loads of inspiration. Rikk is a professional photographer, image consultant and instructor, serving the imaging community with a variety of services related to photography, graphic design and instruction. In addition to full studio operations, Flohr shoots corporate events around the US. and is also currently employed by Adobe as the Community Manager for Adobe Voice.

He’s been a featured­ columnist for CorelDraw Unleashed magazine, writing about various digital photography and image editing topics. He also teaches at national software conferences like CorelWorld, the CorelDraw User’s Conference, PowerPoint Live Presentation Summit, and Adobe’s Photoshop & You. In addition, he regularly present at regional photographic societies and teach a variety of topics in digital capture, processing and workflow.

Currently Rikk’s work can be seen at his website and he also maintains Holy Crop, a blog devoted solely to the cropping of images.

Save the Date! St. Croix Valley Photo Day

At the regular January meeting Art Juchno shared a time-lapse video, “SkyScapes”, created from several sequences of cloud movements he took last year. It is enthralling to see what your eye misses in real time. I have experimented with this before and Art has renewed my interest in doing more.

Art’s time-lapse advice:

Use a sturdy tripod

Test your intervalometer before you need it and again just before you start shooting a sequence.

Use manual mode, setting the exposure, ISO, white balance and aperture. Also use manual focus.

The time between frames determines the speed; the more time between frames, the faster the animation.

Polarizing filters make skies more dramatic.

Import all frames into Lightroom. If you need to adjust one frame you need to make the same adjustment to all. This can be done by syncing the develop settings to all the frames.

Art uses Sony Vegas to create the video, and since it does not accept the Raw format, all the frames need to be exported as jpg’s. Several sequences can be added and re-ordered for the video. A soundtrack can be added, but be aware of copyright issues when posting to the web.

When rendering the video, create it with the proper codec as required by YouTube, Vimeo, etc. Mpeg4, .Mov, Mpeg2, AVI and H.264 are some of the common codecs.

Coming Up – John Pennoyer

Our next meeting at 6:30 on May 6 will feature a showing of member submitted images that will be judged by Russ Borud, a St. Paulite. Russ has done wedding and commercial work, has had one-man shows and has also taught photography. He says that his first serious camera was purchased with money earned by picking potatoes in 1947 and that the photographic arts has been his milk and honey for many years.

Members Mike and Sue Fries, owners of CloseUp Images, will be showing some of their unique printing options for photos and will be offering a discount to our members. Personally, I love the look of the metal prints that they do and am thinking that it could be a great alternative presentation for my contribution to the group exhibits that we have coming up this year. You can find them on our member links in the sidebar.

Do you have any old photography magazines? I have a few and will be bringing them to be recycled by our members. We will put out a box at every meeting for “freebies” like this.

N4C News

Since February, our members have been competing in the monthly N4C contests, and Amanda Bierbaum was just awarded a 1st Place for “Desert Rainbow” for the month of April. This is her second 1st Place award in just three months! Check out the inspiring galleries and consider entering future contests. This is one of the benefits of membership in our club. Continue reading »

Free Inspirational Program

On Friday, May 1, a Space St.Croix launch event will be held at the Phipps. The free program, which will be held in the same room that we meet, will begin at 6:00 pm, with a question and answer period at 7:00 pm.

New York City-based documentary photographer Michael Soluri will speak about his latest work, “Infinite Worlds” (Simon & Schuster). For three years, Soluri had exclusive access to the astronaut crew, labor force and tools of the shuttle mission that saved and extended the life of the Hubble Space Telescope. With a Foreword by John Glenn, “Infinite Worlds”, through photographs and first person stories, reveals the art, craft and evidence of human spaceflight on Earth and in space. Continue reading »

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The Western Wisconsin Photography Club is a member of the Twin Cities Area Council of Camera Clubs (TCACCC) and the North Centrail Council of Camera Clubs (N4C). The contents of this site are copyrighted by the Western Wisconsin Photography Club and its members unless otherwise noted. Neither images nor text may be used without permission.